[keanebean86]

This whole situation reminds me of the EMDrive. There was huge excitement when the news broke of a claimed way to produce momentum without expelling mass. That excitement was only intensified when NASA agreed to test one of the proposed designs. Even after multiple reproducible experiments showed zero thrust a vocal minority still believed.

This isn't exactly like that since the results are slightly less conclusive at this point. But the excitement without reproducible data is definitely there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

[mikewarot]

Unrelated to EmDrive, but similar... is the thruster based on the theory of Quantized Inertia[0]... it passed multiple lab tests on the ground, and is now in orbit[1,2], waiting for the other experiments in the satellite to be completed before they power it up. If it works as expected, they'll be boosting the orbit of the satellite by 100km without using propellant, thanks to a 1 milliNewton electric thruster pushing on its mass of 4.8 Kg.

[0] https://quantizedinertia.com/

[1] https://db.satnogs.org/satellite/QDDY-8878-5291-1819-3935#ma...

[2] https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/graph-orbit-data.php?CA...

[mikewarot]

Oops.... #2 should be 58338 (wrong object #)

https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/graph-orbit-data.php?CA...

[m463]

Not quite as messy as the ecat:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

[sanxiyn]

As I understand, neither EmDrive nor E-Cat could be reproduced by any third party. This paper is a third party reproduction, so it seems pretty different.